11 March 2008
Death at a Funeral (2007)
I remember reading a story where Marlon Brando, in his somewhat cuckoo twilight years, refused to work with Frank Oz in that bank heist movie with Edward Norton and Robert de Niro. de Niro would direct Brando via an Oz-equipped ear piece at the other end because Oz and Brando argued about how gay the character should be (a little less day-glo makeup, maybe).
But the most vivid thing I recall from The Score is just how damn dull it was. Like everyone was just going through the motions and no one could get excited about. You know, like they were all phoning it in. Come to think of it, a table of ear pieces with the dialogue dubbed over it might make for a more interesting movie. 
Which is to say: Death at a Funeral. Yeesh. Eugene really hated it, but I kept holding out for some kind of wry humor to be dredged up, but God it was dull. The quarries of irony wherewith an uptight British woman yells “WE’RE GOING TO A FUNERAL! HAVE SOME FUCKIN’ RESPECT” have been thoroughly mined, so I think Eugene was really right when he said it was utterly painful to see a group of people trying so hard to elevate something that so invertebrate and lifeless. Oh.
But really, it’s just a bunch of slapstick comedy with a sense of timing mired in mediocrity. What this movie really had going for it–as far as the blurb on the Netflix sleeve, at least–was the closeted gay patriarch. But even that doesn’t work at all because it’s used solely to show slap-sticky pictures and set up an ending whose anticipation is much funnier than its execution, mostly because this rubbish (that’s British for garbage! I think I’ll have some tea!) went out of its way to tell you what was going to happen well before it even seemed possible to give said event some plausibility, I suppose, but at the same time it stripped it of any chance of being funny when the gag finally rolled around.
So then there’s the expected chaos, where everyone finds out everyone’s secrets anyway despite all the tom-foolery of the previous 80 minutes (this is the longest 90 minute movie ever, by the way) and the youngest son giving the eulogy (if his name wasn’t Daniel, it should have been) begins shouting it over all the chaos. And if that doesn’t precede the most embarrassing sequence of emoting-reaction shots that I’ve ever seen, then my name should be Daniel too.